Saturday, October 6, 2012

With Halloween approaching I thought it timely to discuss
Horror and Slasher Films. I've been shocked in the past twenty years at the
plethora of these films that have graced our theatre and television screens. It
seems nearly half of the movies made fit this genre.

The problem with lumping these two categories together, however, is that
‘horror’ is really nothing like ‘slasher’. True horror movies involve an aspect
of the psychological: Psycho, House on Haunted Hill, Rose Red. They don’t
produce scares just for the sake of making the viewer jump. Slasher films, on
the other hand, are made just for that purpose. How many times can we make the
viewer scream, cover their eyes, jump. For that reason I don’t attend slasher
films. I only enjoy going to true horror movies. It’s upsetting to me that the
majority of ‘horror’ movies these days are slashers. It’s demeaning to the
audience for producers to think that viewers don’t want intelligent horror.

I’m going to age myself here, as though you couldn’t guess from my pictures
anyway, but when I was about twelve-years-old The Birds by
Alfred Hitchcock came out. I was babysitting my sister, five years younger, and
we watched it. Alone. Just the two of us. BIG MISTAKE. We woke each other
during the night for bathroom company (which was about three feet from our
bedroom door) for at least two months afterward. That was the scariest movie I
had ever seen.

I had my own children watch it about ten years ago. While they enjoyed the
classic nature and awesome direction that was Hitchcock, they weren’t exactly
scared. Although the younger ones searched the sky whenever traveling from
house to car or vice versa.

That is what has happened to the current generation of teens and twenties. They
are completely desensitized to horror, gore, violence. Don’t even get me
started on video games!

As with all movie genres there are good films and bad to awful films.
While researching this I gave it some thought and have categorized the
following Horror to A-little-Scary movies into GOOD or NOT SO GOOD according to
MY subjective movie-goer senses. If a movie has some psychology behind the
scare or is based on actual events, it gets my thumb up. But violence and gore
for the sake of it – no go.

The following sites have good info on horror/slasher films:
http://www.best-horror-movies.com/horror-movie-on-dvd.html
http://www.onlygoodmovies.com/good/movies/horror/

GOOD SCARY MOVIES

1408

28
Days Later

28
Weeks Later

30
Days of Night

Alien(s)

Amityville
Horror (original)

Blair
Witch Project 1

Burnt
Offerings

Candyman

Carrie
(original)

Coraline

Cube

Dawn
of the Dead

Deliverance

Desperation

Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (original)

Event
Horizon

Exorcism
of Emily Rose

Fallen

Four
Horsemen

Frankenstein

Haunting
in Connecticut

I Am
Legend

Interview
With a Vampire

Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (original)

Jaws

Misery

Mothman
Prophecy

Mouth
of Madness

Ninth
Gate

Nosferatu

Panic
Room

Pan's
Labyrinth

Planet
of the Apes

Poltergeist

Psycho

Quarantine

Resident
Evil

Ringu

Rose
Red

Rosemary's
Baby

Salem's
Lot

Seven

Shutter
Island

Silence
of the Lambs

Sleepy
Hollow

Stir
of Echoes

Storm
of the Century

Sweeney
Todd

Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (original)

The
Birds

The
Blob

The
Descent

The
Devil’s Backbone

The
Exorcist

The
Fly (w/ Jeff Goldblum)

The
Howling

The
Langoliers

The
Legend of Hell House

The
Mummy

The
Omen

The
Orphanage

The
Other

The
Others

The
Ring 1

The
Serpent and the Rainbow

The
Shining

The
Stand

The
Thing

The
Unborn

Underworld
(series)

Untraceable

What
Lies Beneath

White
Noise

Zodiac
Killer

Zombieland

Some things to remember about these lists. They are
subjective to the viewer - ME. I have seen most of the movies on the bad list
and while I enjoyed them at the time or at least sat through them at least
once, I didn't consider them worthy of being called GOOD. The plot was weak,
the characterization was weak or non-existent, the ending was lame. You get the
point. But there is no reason not to see them just because I put them on my bad
list. I love B-rated movies, especially those on the SyFy Channel, but some of
these don’t even stand up to my low standards.

NOT SO GOOD or TOO EVIL/DEMONIC SCARY MOVIES (doesn't mean I haven't watched
them all)

13
Ghosts

2001
Maniacs

Alien
3 & Resurrection

Arachnophobia

Black
Christmas

Cabin
Fever

Children
of the Corn

Chucky

Cloverfield
(made me nauseated)

Drag
Me to Hell

Exorcist
2

Final
Destination (all)

Friday
the 13th (all)

Ghost
Ship

Grindhouse
(both)

Halloween
(all)

Hellraiser

Hostel

House
of Wax

I Know
What You Did Last Summer

It!

Jaws
the Revenge

Joy
Ride (all)

My
Bloody Valentine

Nightmare
on Elm Street

Pet
Semetary

Piranha

Prom
Night

Pterodactyl

Rest
Stop

Return
of the Living Dead

Saw
(all)

Scream

Silent
Hill

Texas
Chainsaw Massacre

The
Grudge (all)

The
Hills Have Eyes

Wickerman

Wrong
Turn (all)

Here is a listing of Scary stories based on actual events. While I’m not saying
these films are GOOD, they are at least interesting from that aspect.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Today I’m discussing a monster new to me. I was watching one
of my favorite shows the other morning, Supernatural, and the boys had to
confront something called a Rugaroo. I immediately jumped onto Google to
investigate this scary, intriguing creature. Here's what I found out.

The term Roogaroo, Rugaroo, Ruggaroo, Roux-Ga-Roux (among other spellings)
probably stems from the French word "loup garou" for werewolf.
According to Barry Jean Ancelet, an academic expert on Cajun folklore and
professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the tale of the rougarou
is a common legend across French Louisiana. Both words are used interchangeably
in southern Louisiana. Some people call the monster rougarou; others refer to
it as the loup garou. However, the Rugaroo is NOT just a werewolf. It has
similar but different characteristics. For one, it can shape-shift at will (not
just full moons) and not only into a wolf form. It can take on the shape of any
animal--even human.

The rougarou legend has been spread for many generations,
either directly from French settlers to Louisiana (New France) or via the
French Canadian immigrants centuries ago.

In the Cajun legend, the creature supposedly prowls the swamps around Acadiana
and Greater New Orleans, and possibly the fields or forests of the regions. The
rougarou is usually described as a creature with a human body and the head of a
wolf or dog, similar to the werewolf legend.

As with fairytales, it is believed that often the story-telling was used to
instill fear. Supposedly, elders used the stories to persuade Cajun children to
behave. Another example relates that the wolf-like beast will hunt down and
kill Catholics who do not follow the rules of Lent. This coincides with the French
Catholic loup garou stories, where the method for turning into a werewolf was
to break Lent seven years in a row.

A common blood sucking legend speculated that the rougarou was under the spell
for 101 days. After that time, the curse was transferred from person to person
when the rougarou drew another human’s blood. During the day the creature
returned to human form. Although feeling sickly, the person refused to tell
others for fear of being killed.

Other stories range from the rougarou as a headless horseman
to the rougarou derived from witchcraft. In the latter claim, only a witch
could make a rougarou - either by turning themselves into wolves or cursing
others with lycanthropy.

As with legends passed by oral tradition, stories often contradict one another.
The stories of the wendigo vary by tribe and region, but the most common cause
of the change is typically related to cannibalism.

A modified example, not in the original wendigo legends, is that if a person
saw a rugaru, they would be transformed into one. Thereafter, they would be
doomed to wander as a rugaru. That story bears some resemblance to a Native
American version of the wendigo legend related in a short story by Algernon
Blackwood. In Blackwood's fictional adaptation of the legend, seeing a wendigo
caused one to turn into a wendigo.

According to The American Journal of Psychiatry Vol. 134, No. 10. published in
October 1977: "Lycanthropy, a psychosis in which the patient has
delusions of being a wild animal (usually a wolf), has been recorded since
antiquity. The Book of Daniel describes King Nebuchadnezzar as suffering from
depression that deteriorated over a seven-year period into a frank psychosis at
which time he imagined himself a wolf. Among the first medical descriptions
were those of Paulus Aegineta during the later days of the Roman Empire. In his
description of the symptom complex, Aegineta made reference to Greek mythology
in which Zeus turned King Lycaon of Arcadia into a raging wolf.

Folk-etymology links the word to Lycaon, a king of Arcadia
who, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, was turned into a ravenous wolf in
retribution for attempting to serve human flesh (his own son) to visiting Zeus
in an attempt to disprove the god's divinity.

There is also a mental illness called lycanthropy in which a patient believes
he or she is, or has transformed into, an animal and behaves accordingly. This
is sometimes referred to as clinical lycanthropy to distinguish it from its use
in legends.

While the wolf is the most common form of were-animal, in the north the bear is
common in legends. In ancient Greece the dog was associated with the belief and
today the were-boar variant is known through Greece and Turkey.

Even if when the term lycanthropy is limited to the wolf-metamorphosis of
living human beings, the beliefs classed together under this head are far from
uniform. The transformation may be temporary or permanent; the were-animal may
be a metamorphosed person, or maybe a double whose activity leaves the real
person unchanged. It could be a soul seeking to devour while leaving its body
in a state of trance. Or perchance a messenger of a human being, a real animal
or familiar spirit, whose connection with its owner is demonstrated through injury,
by a phenomenon known as repercussion, to cause a corresponding injury to the
human being.

Lycanthropy is often confused with transmigration; but the
essential feature of the were-animal is that it is the double of a living human
being, while the soul-animal is the vehicle, temporary or permanent, of the
spirit of a dead human being. Nevertheless, instances in legend of humans
reincarnated as wolves are often classed with lycanthropy, as well as these instances
being labeled werewolves in local folklore.

Many Native cultures feature skin-walkers or a similar concept, wherein a
shaman or warrior may, according to cultural tradition, take on an animal form.
Animal forms can vary according to cultures and local species (including bears
and wolves or coyotes). Skinwalkers tend to be totemic.

Author Peter Matthiessen determined that rugaru is a separate legend from that
of the cannibal-like giant wendigo. While the wendigo was feared, he noted that
the rugaru was seen as sacred and in tune with Mother Earth, in the same
character of the bigfoot legends of today.

The Rugaroo can vary from a mild Big-foot-type creature to cannibalistic Native
American Wendigos. While the lore of the cannibalistic Wendigos is prevalent
throughout the Algonquian-speaking tribes in the northern US and Canada, the
Rugaroo legend comes mostly from the Ojibwe and Chippewa tribes where is it
considered sacred and in touch with Mother Earth, much like the Big-Foot is
considered today.

Friday, March 30, 2012

This is a guest post by Seth Godin about a topic near and
dear to my heart, so listen up and do something about it before it's too late
for all of our children.

The economy has changed, probably forever.

School hasn't.

School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to
the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at
achieving this goal, but it's not a goal we need to achieve any longer.

In this 30,000 word manifesto, I imagine a different set of goals and start (I
hope) a discussion about how we can reach them. One thing is certain: if we
keep doing what we've been doing, we're going to keep getting what we've been
getting.

Here are four versions of the manifesto. Pick the one that you need, and feel free
to share. To download a file, you'll probably need the option key or the right
click button on your mouse... ask a teenager if you get stuck.

You'll need to download it and then plug in your Kindle via a USB cable. Drag
the file to the Documents folder on your Kindle and boom, you're done. I'm told
that you can also open it with the Kindle reader on your Mac, PC or iPad.